This article originally appeared on the Databox Blog.
HubSpot’s software does an exceptional job of collecting data from every part of the inbound marketing and sales funnel, and enabling a robust set of marketing, sales and services activities to boot.
However, as the customer count has gone north of 30,000, the number of marketers executing the inbound playbook has also skyrocketed.
Even the best inbound marketers and sales professionals have realized the original inbound tactics are not enough to stay relevant.
Fortunately, the massive HubSpot ecosystem has spawned hundreds of tools that allow sales and marketing teams to execute more sophisticated inbound campaigns. Although you cannot win with tools alone, by integrating other marketing and sales tools with the HubSpot platform, you give yourself a chance to distinguish your campaigns from all the other digital marketers that have joined the bandwagon.
To figure out the latest and greatest, we surveyed top inbound marketers in the Databox partner community, and asked, “What is your favorite tool that integrates with HubSpot?”
To make this long list useable, we grouped the tools into categories by function:
Function of Integration
If you are interested in investigating even more tools, you should check out the HubSpot Connect program, which maintains a comprehensive list of integrations.
Sales
Drift
Senior Rewards Specialist, Smile.io
What It Does: “Drift allows us to have real time conversations with our prospects/customers on-site.
We’ve found it reduces our time to engage and our total sales cycle. It’s also simply a great experience for our merchants (end-users).”
Value of Integration: “Integrating Drift takes the pain out of having leads live in two disparate systems. The value of forms/chat is that the data automatically populates into your CRM for reps to reference at a later date.
With this roadblock gone, chat becomes painless & our reps love using it.”
Dir. of Client Services, SparkReaction
What It Does: “Drift is a chat function for your website.”
Value of Integration: “Drift lives right on your website and integrates with HubSpot seamlessly. By using Drift we have significantly increased our leads.”
PandaDoc
Director, MPULL
What It Does: “PandaDoc creates professional online documents, an awesome replacement to the PDF and it has transactional functionality within the docs.”
Value of Integration: “Populate documents to make them custom and personalized using the rich data profiles that are stored in HubSpot”
CEO, Huify
What It Does: “PandaDoc is a document automation and management software that allows for the quick and efficient creation of trackable documents that enable you to close more business.”
Value of Integration: “PandaDoc integrates with HubSpot Sales so that you can easily pull contact info directly from the CRM into your contract or proposal. This allows for the quick creation of error free contracts. Anyone who has ever sent a contract with a typo will instantly see the value. PandaDoc also allows you to see the viewing activity of a contract. That way, you can see if and when they viewed your proposal and where they spent their time in the document. Pretty useful for refining contracts and closing deals. ”
Marketing
Seventh Sense
Blog Manager, LeadG2
What It Does: “Seventh Sense analyzes the engagement data in your HubSpot account and delivers each of the emails you send at each individual’s “best” time — the time the data has shown the individual is most likely to engage with emails.”
Value of Integration: “They are a HubSpot Connect partner — the software analyzes the engagement data in your HubSpot account, and it allows you to schedule any of your HubSpot workflows to be delivered through Seventh Sense.”
Director, CLCK Digital
What It Does: “SeventhSense allows us to send emails in a “window” of time, with each recipient receiving their email at the optimal time, based on their previous interactions with our emails or website.”
Value of Integration: “This increases email open rates and click throughs. It’s a one time set up and then they easily pull the data they need from HubSpot’s back end.”
Founder, Consilium Global Business Advisors
What It Does: “Seventh Sense uses the HubSpot workflow tool to deliver bulk emails at individually optimized send times.”
Value of Integration: “Email deliverability is a huge challenge for digital marketers. The most important factor in deliverability is engagement, and simply tweaking subject lines and days of the week isn’t enough. Seventh Sense delivers every individual email the the best time for that person based on their individual habits. It’s different than many tools – it doesn’t just make work easier…it makes work better.”
SurveyMonkey
President, Prism Global Marketing
What It Does: “SurveyMonkey empowers companies to build quick surveys to gather real-time insights from their database. Surveys can be used to gauge interest from prospects, gather NPS scores, get market information, understand what customers are thinking, and much more.
Giving companies the ability to get real-time feedback from prospects and customers allows organizations to make better business decisions and address customer issues at a much faster rate.”
Value of Integration: “SurveyMonkey integrates with HubSpot by allowing companies to do any of the following:
- Create new contacts that respond to your survey
- Segment your contacts based on how they respond to specific survey questions
- Determine who has and has not completed specific surveys
- Sync full details of survey responses to HubSpot
- Pass contact information to Salesforce for sales reps to utilize these insights
The importance of this is that you can segment contacts based on how they respond to surveys, which allows you to market to them and connect with them at various levels of the buyer’s journey. There are countless ways to utilize the SurveyMonkey and HubSpot integration, and the data you can gather from surveys and use in your marketing efforts is truly invaluable.”
Rybbon
Dir. of Marketing, Higher Logic
What It Does: “Streamlines rewards and recognition process, full integration with HubSpot.”
Value of Integration: “Campaigns are easily administered, gift card codes and automatically processed, tracked and released to appropriate leads and/or customers in our database.”
Facebook Ads
Founder, hubWerks
What It Does: “I can see what the spend is, what the CTR rates is–all without logging into FB.”
Value of Integration: “When I pull from the CRM, I can see data that would require filters to set up or isn’t actually available in the HS platform.”
Eventbrite
CEO, Jaxzen Marketing
What It Does: “Online event registration and promotion.”
Value of Integration: “The Eventbrite integration with HubSpot connects your online and offline marketing efforts. With the integration, you can collect leads into HubSpot, track who’s registering for (and attending) your events, and more easily communicate with your registrants before and after the event.”
Marketing Manager, Adhere Creative
What It Does: “When it comes to managing events for my clients, Eventbrite is my go-to solution. From event registration to payment collection and even name tag printing, Eventbrite has everything I need to maximize the ROI for all my client’s events.”
Value of Integration: “For HubSpot users, integrating Eventbrite is as easy as it comes. Once connected, registrants will automatically be added to HubSpot as new contacts (or if the contact already exists, they will be marked and added to the event registrants list), giving you the ability to monitor their activity on your site, track progress through the buyer’s journey, and the ability to setup workflows for customized event reminders and follow ups.”
Analytics
Databox (yes, that’s us)
Director, CLCK Digital
What It Does: “Databox has taken our reporting OUT of Excel spreadsheets and enabled us to give clients attractive looking dashboards they can check any time, with just the stats they care about.”
Value of Integration: “It’s a one time set up and then they easily pull the data they need from HubSpot’s back end.”
Digital Strategist, Connection Model
What It Does: “This tool makes it simple to see all your performance data in one view. It buys back your time.”
Value of Integration: “It seamlessly integrates with HubSpot — as if someone had insider knowledge! Being able to select custom rules and segments with Google Analytics is a huge plus too. We love that we can view HubSpot data right next to Google Analytics data.”
CEO, SeventhSense
What It Does: “For one, it provides me with the ability to get very quick insights from a day to day perspective.
Two, when I’m looking for an answer, the intuitiveness of the system is second to none. Every other visualization tool I’ve used in the past is incredibly complex and I’ve had to get a developer or support involved to help with the process of getting me my answer. Databox doesn’t have this problem and is an absolute no-brainer.”
Value of Integration: “Their HubSpot out-of-the-box metrics and dashboards were developed so HubSpot customers can instantly see their data –little customization needed. But, Databox also gives me the ability to build what I want to see and allows me the ability to customize how I want to see it.”
TrenDemon
Senior Content Marketing Strategist, Alaniz Marketing
What It Does: “Content marketing attribution and personalization platform, helping marketers understand, align and automatically improve the impact of their efforts on sales.”
Value of Integration: “TrenDemon tracks how people actually convert on your website–what pages they visit that drive conversion, and then automates the presentation of content to web visitors based on what is most likely to get them to take the next step based on that data. We have our idealized buyer’s journey–TrendDemon shows us what the real buyer’s journey is and helps us optimize it.”
Hotjar
Inbound Marketing Specialist, Weidert Group
What It Does: “HotJar allows us to capture user interactions with our website via heat maps, recordings, lead funnels, and surveys.”
Value of Integration: “HotJar’s HubSpot integration allows us to connect the poll results with specific contacts. We are then able to connect poll results with a contacts activity on our site to see why a content piece did or did not resonate with them.”
Founder, g2m Solutions
What It Does: “It allows us to see how core pages on the website are working and how visitors are interacting with the page content and optimising the pages based on real visitor data.”
Value of Integration: “We can segment the data based on user behavior and target our marketing with custom messaging.”
CallRail
CEO, Impulse Creative
What It Does: “CallRail allows us to plug another analytics hole for inbound phone calls. Many times the effectiveness of campaigns is only measured with online forms. CallRail allows for us to track (and record) incoming calls, understand the intent of the call, and see source details too.”
Value of Integration: “CallRail integrates with HubSpot and will match the phone number to the contact database if it exists. You also have an option of letting the call create a new contact in HubSpot.”
Videos and Webinars
Wistia
Digital Marketing Manager, Agricen
What It Does: “Wistia is a video hosting platform with its own built-in analytics and inbound marketing tools. It provides more appearance customization than a standard YouTube embedded video, allowing us to better tailor the video content experience on our website.”
Value of Integration: “The integration allows analytics and lead generation data to be shared directly with HubSpot. We can generate CTAs to drive traffic to our site, capture leads during video playback, and track engagement with our content across the site for each contact. The value is in being able to build and track video campaigns as if it were just another component of the built-in HubSpot suite.”
CEO, Nextiny Marketing
What It Does: “Wistia allows you to host and track your videos in order to measure success on your video marketing and video sales efforts. By using Wistia, you can very easily recognize ways to improve your videos in the future and utilize their features to increase engagement, play rate and conversions.”
Value of Integration: “You can recognize when leads are engaging with your videos, how video is assisting leads to move through the funnel and how video in general is helping you convert and close more and better leads into paying customers (ROI). You can also create triggers from video engagement and use it on workflows to create next steps and for example notify sales people that they need to contact a lead that just watched a video.”
TwentyThree
Director of Multimedia, Revenue River
What It Does: “TwentyThree allows you to take your video marketing to a completely new level with analytics, video viewing data, and your video promotion strategy. On top of providing beefy data on everything you could ever need from a video marketing aspect, TwentyThree has a super powerful API toolkit that allows you to build video into nearly every aspect of your website and elsewhere all while maintaining brand aesthetics. ”
Value of Integration: “TwentyThree integrates with HubSpot through contact specific video viewing properties. The integration allows you to segment data by percentage of video watched, what specific video they watched/filled out a “collector” form on! All in all, the integration is supercharged to help you understand how your audience is engaging with your video, or what PART of your videos. A must have if you are serious about video, but even more serious about who is watching and why.”
ReadyTalk
Dir. of Client Services, Austin Lawrence Group
What It Does: “ReadyTalk is our favorite webinar platform. It is user friendly and intuitive to use. On the odd chance we have an issue their support team, particularly their integration specialists, are easy to connect with and very knowledgeable. ”
Value of Integration: “ReadyTalk integrates seamlessly with HubSpot, making it easy to create registration pages and confirmation emails with access details. Webinar attendee information synchronizes immediately after the webinar making it easy to send follow-up emails and create webinar reports. We love that the polling responses also sync, adding even more valuable data about these contacts to the database for use in workflows and lead nurturing.”
StealthSeminar
CEO, Elevator Agency
What It Does: “StealthSeminar allows the repeat scheduling of pre-recorded, evergreen webinars. The great thing about this is that you can do a webinar once and then put it on a schedule to repeat on a desired interval, allowing you to get the most out of evergreen webinar content. You can even join in so that you can chat live with attendees, answering questions in real time.
This gives the best of both worlds — convenience with minimal setup, yet live interaction, giving attendees maximum value.”
Value of Integration: “There’s a little bit of setup involved (making sure you setup new fields in HubSpot, for example), but the StealthSeminar team makes it very easy to integrate. Their customer service is awesome.
Once integrated, you can create workflows that trigger based on registrant context — when they login, view your call to action, complete the webinar, attempt to attend after it’s over, X hours before the event, registered but didn’t attend, etc. — which allows you to build-out the appropriate follow-up so that they happen like clockwork. It truly becomes a machine for your business.”
GoTo Webinar
Dir. of Client Services, Whole Brain Group
What It Does: “It’s an opportunity to host webinars for marketing.”
Value of Integration: “It allows us to automatically collect the data from GoTo (registrants, attendees, etc.) and sync it with HubSpot. We can also follow up with attendees based on whether or not they attended.”
Advanced Content Creation
Belch
Senior Marketing Manager, Big Presence
What It Does: “We built Belch.io’s visual page builder to enable creative marketers like myself to create custom landing pages and emails for HubSpot without the help of a developer.”
Value of Integration: “I hit “Publish to HubSpot” and all the code is already there. The value of it is that it can save up to 90% of development and design time for building new landing page and email templates. Every agency should get it.”
Beacon
Inbound Marketing Consultant, Pepperland Marketing
What It Does: “Beacon makes the ebook and content creation process infinitely easier, especially if you or your client publish your blog through the HubSpot COS. In addition to offering templates for different kinds of ebooks/content offers, it has a sort of drag-and-drop wizard interface that just makes it easy to use, especially for someone who is not design or tech savvy.”
Value of Integration: “You can use Beacon on its own and just manually import content, which is okay, but if you use HubSpot’s COS to publish your blog, you can import your blog posts into an ebook template.
This automatically formats the content according to the template, making it possible for you to create an ebook from blog content in as little as 5 minutes. Plus, you can create and save templates, which is extremely helpful if you are creating content offer for different clients; just take an hour or two to set up your brand templates and then it’s easy as pie in the future.”
SnapApp
Partner, GET LIFT Agency
What It Does: “Interactive Content. It’s much easier to create engaging content (assessments, interactive videos, quizzes, infographics) than the old method that required a lot of development work. Our design team loves it.”
Value of Integration: “Being able to match user fields from both tools enables better forms.”
Join the Future of Inbound Marketing
As of August 2017, HubSpot is growing 40% year over year. The inbound way of doing business is becoming more and more standard.
Unfortunately, this is leading to a “race to the bottom” where declining returns are forcing marketers to pump out more and more content — often of questionable quality. In HubSpot CMO Kip Bodnar’s rant on how marketers inevitably ruin all marketing channels, he said, “The volume of content went up, the quality often went down.”
While the tools and the tactics listed above don’t obviate the need for quality content, they certainly give marketers and salespeople more ways to attract and engage their best-fit prospects.
With a long and growing list of innovative tools available to HubSpot customers, the question becomes: Will you and your company be pioneering the future of inbound or will you continue to stay lost in a sea of mediocre sameness?
Don’t see your favorite HubSpot-integrated tool on the list above? Feel free to share it here. We will be constantly updating this post to make it easier for HubSpot users to discover the best new HubSpot-integrated tools.
